Opinion | People Have Stopped Going to the Doctor. Most Seem Just Fine. (Published 2020)

If beneficial routine care dropped during the past few months of the pandemic lockdown, so perhaps did its malignant counterpart, unnecessary care. If so, this has implications for how we should reopen our health care system. Doctors and hospitals will want to ramp up care to make up for lost revenue. But this will not serve our patients’ needs.

The start-up should begin with a renewed commitment to promoting beneficial care and eliminating unnecessary care. Most doctors recognize the importance of this distinction, even if we don’t always act on it. In a survey a few years ago, two-thirds of doctors in the United States admitted that between 15 percent and 30 percent of health care is pro... See more

However, there is a more troubling explanation to consider: Perhaps Americans don’t require the volume of care that their doctors are used to providing.

As stay-at-home orders ease and cities reopen for business, many doctors and hospital administrators are calling for a quick return of health care to pre-pandemic levels. For months now, routine care has been postponed. Elective procedures — big moneymakers — were halted so that hospitals could divert resources to treating Covid-19 patients. Routin... See more

Still, a vast majority of patients seem to have fared better than what most doctors expected. It will probably take years to understand why. Perhaps patients mitigated the harm of delayed care by adopting healthful behaviors, such as smoking less and exercising more. Perhaps the huge increases in stress were balanced out by other things, such as sp... See more